Uncharted Depths: Exploring Young Tennyson's Restless Years
The poet Tennyson was known as a torn spirit. He produced a verse titled The Two Voices, in which two aspects of the poet debated the arguments of suicide. Within this insightful book, the author decides to concentrate on the overlooked character of the literary figure.
A Defining Year: 1850
During 1850 proved to be crucial for Tennyson. He unveiled the significant verse series In Memoriam, over which he had laboured for close to twenty years. Therefore, he grew both renowned and prosperous. He entered matrimony, subsequent to a long relationship. Previously, he had been dwelling in leased properties with his mother and siblings, or lodging with unmarried companions in London, or staying by himself in a rundown dwelling on one of his local Lincolnshire's bleak shores. At that point he acquired a home where he could receive notable callers. He assumed the role of the official poet. His life as a Great Man began.
Even as a youth he was striking, almost magnetic. He was very tall, disheveled but handsome
Lineage Struggles
The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “prone to melancholy”, meaning susceptible to temperament and sadness. His paternal figure, a unwilling priest, was volatile and very often inebriated. There was an incident, the details of which are obscure, that resulted in the domestic worker being fatally burned in the residence. One of Alfred’s siblings was confined to a lunatic asylum as a youth and remained there for the rest of his days. Another endured deep despair and copied his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself experienced bouts of debilitating gloom and what he called “bizarre fits”. His poem Maud is told by a madman: he must regularly have wondered whether he could become one himself.
The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson
Even as a youth he was commanding, verging on glamorous. He was exceptionally tall, messy but attractive. Even before he started wearing a black Spanish cloak and headwear, he could control a gathering. But, maturing hugger-mugger with his siblings – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an mature individual he craved isolation, escaping into quiet when in company, disappearing for individual walking tours.
Deep Fears and Crisis of Belief
In Tennyson’s lifetime, geologists, star gazers and those early researchers who were beginning to think with the naturalist about the origin of species, were introducing appalling inquiries. If the story of existence had begun millions of years before the appearance of the human race, then how to hold that the world had been made for humanity’s benefit? “One cannot imagine,” stated Tennyson, “that the entire cosmos was merely made for humanity, who live on a third-rate planet of a third-rate sun The new optical instruments and magnifying tools revealed realms infinitely large and creatures tiny beyond perception: how to hold to one’s faith, in light of such evidence, in a divine being who had created humanity in his own image? If prehistoric creatures had become vanished, then could the humanity follow suit?
Persistent Elements: Mythical Beast and Friendship
The biographer binds his story together with dual persistent motifs. The first he introduces at the beginning – it is the symbol of the legendary sea monster. Tennyson was a 20-year-old undergraduate when he composed his verse about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, “speculative fiction and the scriptural reference”, the short verse presents ideas to which Tennyson would continually explore. Its sense of something enormous, indescribable and sad, concealed out of reach of investigation, prefigures the tone of In Memoriam. It signifies Tennyson’s introduction as a virtuoso of rhythm and as the author of symbols in which awful unknown is condensed into a few dazzlingly evocative lines.
The other theme is the counterpart. Where the fictional beast symbolises all that is melancholic about Tennyson, his connection with a genuine individual, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say ““there was no better ally”, evokes all that is affectionate and humorous in the writer. With him, Holmes introduces us to a aspect of Tennyson seldom known. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his most impressive lines with ““odd solemnity”, would abruptly roar with laughter at his own solemnity. A Tennyson who, after visiting “dear old Fitz” at home, penned a thank-you letter in poetry portraying him in his rose garden with his pet birds sitting all over him, planting their “rosy feet … on shoulder, hand and knee”, and even on his skull. It’s an vision of pleasure perfectly suited to FitzGerald’s great exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the excellent absurdity of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s pleasing to be informed that Tennyson, the melancholy celebrated individual, was also the source for Lear’s poem about the elderly gentleman with a whiskers in which “a pair of owls and a hen, multiple birds and a small bird” made their homes.
